Ethereum Price Tracker (ETH) & Whale Tracker

What is Ethereum

Ethereum is a programmable blockchain. Where Bitcoin records who owns which coins, Ethereum also runs code, called smart contracts, that any developer can deploy and anyone can use. Those contracts power decentralised exchanges, lending markets, stablecoins, NFTs, prediction markets and most of what people mean by decentralised finance.

Vitalik Buterin described the idea in a 2013 white paper, a public crowdsale funded development in 2014, and the network went live on 30 July 2015. Co-founders included Gavin Wood, who wrote the technical specification and the Solidity language, Joseph Lubin, who went on to found ConsenSys, and Charles Hoskinson, who later created Cardano.

Ether, ticker ETH, is the network's native asset. It pays for computation, secures the chain through staking and serves as collateral across decentralised finance. The live price, market cap and supply figures at the top of this page update automatically.

How Ethereum works

Every operation on Ethereum costs gas, a fee paid in ETH that scales with how much computation a transaction needs. Since the London upgrade in August 2021, each transaction pays a base fee that is burned, plus an optional tip to the validator who includes it. Burning removes ETH from circulation permanently, so busy periods reduce supply.

Ethereum moved from proof of work to proof of stake on 15 September 2022, an event known as the Merge. Instead of miners, validators lock up 32 ETH each and take turns proposing and attesting to blocks every twelve seconds. Misbehaving validators lose part of their stake. The change cut the network's energy use by more than 99 percent and replaced mining rewards with staking yield.

Most activity now happens on layer-2 networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism and Base, which bundle thousands of transactions and post compressed proofs back to Ethereum. The Dencun upgrade in March 2024 introduced blob space, a cheaper data lane for those rollups, and the Pectra upgrade in May 2025 raised the maximum validator balance and let ordinary wallets behave like smart contracts.

Supply and tokenomics

Ethereum has no hard cap. Issuance depends on how much ETH is staked: more validators means slightly more new ETH per year, though the curve flattens quickly. Against that, the base fee burn removes ETH with every transaction. When the network is busy, burning outpaces issuance and the supply shrinks; in quiet periods it grows slowly, typically well under one percent a year.

Around a quarter to a third of all ETH is locked in staking at any time, either directly in validators or through liquid staking tokens such as Lido's stETH. Staked ETH earns a yield paid in new issuance and transaction tips. Large amounts also sit as collateral in lending protocols and as liquidity on decentralised exchanges, which is why the circulating supply figure overstates what is freely available to trade.

History and milestones

The DAO hack in 2016 drained about 3.6 million ETH from an early investment contract. The community voted to reverse the theft with a hard fork, and those who rejected the reversal kept the original chain as Ethereum Classic, which has its own page on this site. The 2017 ICO boom ran almost entirely on Ethereum's ERC-20 token standard, and the 2020 DeFi summer and 2021 NFT wave did the same with ERC-721.

The Beacon Chain launched in December 2020 to test proof of stake, the Merge finished the transition in 2022, and staking withdrawals opened with the Shapella upgrade in April 2023. In July 2024 US spot ether ETFs began trading, giving brokerage accounts direct exposure. Enterprises including Visa, PayPal and large banks have issued stablecoins or tokenised assets on Ethereum or its rollups.

Where to buy and trade Ethereum

ETH is listed on every major exchange, including Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, OKX and Bybit, with deep markets against the dollar, euro and every large stablecoin. In the United States and several other markets you can also hold spot ETH ETFs in a normal brokerage account, some of which pass through staking yield.

On-chain, ETH trades on Uniswap, Curve and other decentralised exchanges directly from a self-custody wallet such as MetaMask or Rabby. Buying on a layer-2 network is cheaper than on mainnet, and most exchanges now support withdrawals straight to Arbitrum, Optimism or Base. The whale tracker on this page highlights large transfers between exchanges and private wallets.

What people use Ethereum for

Stablecoins are the largest use. Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC move hundreds of billions of dollars a month across Ethereum and its rollups, and they are the settlement rail for most crypto trading worldwide. Lending protocols such as Aave let users borrow against ETH or stablecoins without a bank, and decentralised exchanges such as Uniswap settle more spot volume on some days than mid-sized centralised venues.

Beyond finance, Ethereum hosts the Ethereum Name Service, which maps readable names to wallet addresses, tokenised treasury bills and money-market funds from BlackRock and Franklin Templeton, on-chain games, and the identity and attestation tools that layer-2 networks rely on. Each of those applications pays gas in ETH, which ties demand for the token to real activity rather than to speculation alone.

Risks to understand

Ethereum is volatile and tends to move further than Bitcoin in both directions. Smart contract bugs and bridge exploits have cost users billions of dollars over the years, and using decentralised applications means trusting the code you interact with. Approving a malicious contract can drain a wallet in one click, so wallet hygiene matters.

Competition is real. Solana, Avalanche, Sui and other chains compete for the same developers and users, and the shift of activity to layer-2 networks changes how much value accrues to ETH itself. Regulatory treatment of staking and of ETH as a commodity or security has moved back and forth. This guide is a reference, not investment advice.

Ethereum FAQ